360 to be "most reliable" console, says Gates

Microsoft chairman takes question on red rings of death at CES

Bill Gates, head of all things Microsoft, fielded questions from the readers of BBC during an interview at CES in Las Vegas.

The BBC said it has received "a lot of questions" from people who weren't happy with the service they'd been getting from Xbox in the last few years. Gates was asked directly about what he was doing to ensure that new consoles were more reliable than previous ones.

"Well we certainly had to apologise to our users about a number of boxes that had to be replaced," Gates said. "We did that for free, for all those people and we've got a lot of positive feedback about the way we handled it. We've got incredible reliability on the new work that we've done.

"Our commitment is that it will be the most reliable video game box out there. People love the Xbox because of the content but we've got to make sure that the hardware never stands in the way of that." You've got to love his use of the term "video game box" there.